It has been selected by ACS as ACS Editors’ Choice article and published Open Access ($3000 fee waived). ACS selects a paper per day (less than 1% of all papers published) from more than 50 ACS journals as “Editors’ Choice”, so it’s an important recognition that adds visibility to our paper.

We demonstrate that a metallic 2D MXene gas-sensing channel with high conductivity greatly outperforms conventional sensing materials in two critical aspects. First, a Ti3C2Tx gas sensor exhibits a limit of detection of 50~100 parts per billion (ppb) for volatile organic compounds, which is one of the lowest limits of their detection at room temperature ever reported. Second, the extremely low noise of metallic Ti3C2Tx leads to the signal-to-noise ratio two orders of magnitude higher than that of the published sensors. This study introduces a paradigm shift from semiconducting to metallic sensing channels for developing highly sensitive sensors.

The first author, Seon Joon (Steven) Kim, is a former visiting student who spent 6 months at Drexel during his PhD study. We expect him to come back to Drexel as a visiting post-doctoral scientist supported by our NNFC-KAIST-Drexel Nano Co-op Center soon.

Congratulations to Steven, Kathleen, Evelyn, Babak and other co-authors!

Many systems and devices we use every day, including our cell phones and laptops, require batteries. Electric cars, solar and wind farms, and off-grid homes need much larger batteries. And we expect smart clothes and the internet to change how we live and how we gather and consume information in the near future. They will all need to be powered, but by much smaller, more flexible, and longer-lasting energy storage devices. The speakers presented on the discovery of the lithium battery and the long journey from the Sony camcorder battery to the modern lithium-ion battery. They also explained what is coming after lithium-ion batteries. In particular, “batteries on steroids,” or electrochemical capacitors, that now power buses in many Chinese cities, open the doors of an Airbus 380 in an emergency, and harvest braking energy from SEPTA trains, will be discussed. Finally, future flexible, transparent, microscale, wearable, and other energy storage devices that are expected to become ubiquitous within the next decade will be discussed. View pictures from the event below.

Congratulations to Prof. Yury Gogotsi for being awarded the 2017 Energy Storage Materials Award (Elsevier) in recognition of his outstanding achievements in the field of energy storage materials and development.

Congratulations to BS alumna Pri Narang (currently, Asst. Prof. at Harvard) on a major national recognition. She has been selected by Forbes Among 30 Under 30 in science for her work on quantum-engineered materials.

Our work on nanodiamond additive suppressing lithium dendrites keeps attracting attention of news media. This article titled “Nanodiamonds Found to Prevent Lithium Battery Fires” was published in EE Times this week.

Professor Yury Gogotsi has won the 2017 Energy Storage Materials Award, which is awarded by the journal Energy Storage Materials. The Award will be presented to Professor Gogotsi at the ICEnSM 2017 (2017 International Conference on Energy Storage Materials), which will be held in Shenzhen, China, on Nov. 18-21, 2017. The award, which is sponsored by Elsevier, gives special recognition to a person who has accomplished outstanding achievements in energy storage materials and devices.

It turns out that when they’re in a hurry and space is limited, ions, like people, will find a way to cram in — even if that means defying nature’s norms. Recently published research from an international team of scientists, including Drexel University’s Yury Gogotsi, PhD, shows that the charged particles will actually forgo their “opposites attract” behavior, called Coulombic ordering, when confined in the tiny pores of a nanomaterial. This discovery could be a pivotal development for energy storage, water treatment and alternative energy production technologies, which all involve ions packing into nanoporous materials.

In their paper, which was recently published in the journal Nature Materials, the researchers explain how Coulombic ordering in liquid salts starts to break down when ions are confined in small spaces — specifically carbon pores less than a nanometer in diameter. And the narrower the pore, the less the ions adhere to Coulombic ordering. Read the full press release here.

While lithium-ion batteries, widely used in mobile devices from cell phones to laptops, have one of the longest lifespans of commercial batteries today, they also have been behind a number of recent meltdowns and fires due to short-circuiting in mobile devices. In hopes of preventing more of these hazardous malfunctions researchers at Drexel University have developed a recipe that can turn electrolyte solution — a key component of most batteries — into a safeguard against the chemical process that leads to battery-related disasters.